Putting the Questions Differently

It’s very easy to send oneself round the bend for a couple of days. I did it once, out of curiosity. I do not recommend it. I’m a fairly tough character, and I’ve been in contact with a very large number of people who’ve been crazy, and I know quite a lot about it. I sent myself round the bend by not eating and not sleeping for a bit. There’s nothing remarkable about this process. It’s a process deliberately used by medicine men and witch doctors in “primitive societies” all over the world. It’s a process that can be described, let’s say, by prisoners in a prisoner-of-war camp, who’ve been not eating and not sleeping, and they start hallucinating, or have various kinds of experiences of dissociation and so on, or they discover this figure I call a self-hater. I could go on indefinitely. It’s described plentifully in religious literature, both Christian and Eastern.

But what makes a difference is the society you’re in, and how this is accepted by the people around you. If in Africa somebody would turn up saying that they felt disassociated from themselves and heard voices, they wouldn’t be clapped into the nearest loony bin, drugged silly, and given electric convulsive therapy. Now when I, and I may say I’m not the only person who’s done this, deliberately sent myself round the bend to see what it was like, I instantly encountered this figure I call the self-hater. Now since I know, as I say, a little bit about it, I didn’t rush off to the nearest doctor and say: “Oh doctor, I’m hearing voices and I hate myself, and the voices say they want to kill me,” because I knew what was going on. But it is an extremely powerful figure, very frightening, and I’m not surprised that in this very unsophisticated society, unsophisticated psychologically, somebody experiencing this for the first time is scared, loses balance and goes off to the doctor, and I’m afraid to say, in very many cases is then lost. Because what happens is that a person who turns up at the out-patients or whatever, is slammed full of drugs, and then he’s diagnosed as being remote or incapable of contact, or can’t be reached, he’s slammed full of more drugs, and the end of this can very well be in some ghastly snake pit somewhere. I understand that in this country you have as many as in ours. But what is frightening is not the snake pits, because they’re out in the open and people know about them. What is frightening is what goes on in the name of orthodox and general treatment. This is where I think so much damage is caused out of ignorance and stupidity.

Hendin: In the way Martha deals with it, though, she gets quite a bit out of her experience. Whatever she encounters in herself seems to be a source of strength and insight. Do you think that this kind of experience has a positive value?

Lessing: You’ve put a whole lot of things together there. In the first place, Martha’s experience was not an account of mine. But it was similar in some respects. Yes, of course, I got a lot out of it because you learn a great deal about yourself. For one thing, one learns a lot about why some of one’s nearest and dearest land in loony bins.

About the Briefing for a Descent into Hell, one of the starting off points for that was that it occurred to me that so many of the things described by people who are mad are the same. They use the same phrases. They’re fantastically stereotyped in fact, these experiences, and I was trying to think of different interpretations. Now, it is quite possible that this is distorted. It’s an attempt to express something which she’s trying to get through, from somewhere else. It’s probable that there’s another dimension, very close to the one that we’re used to, and that people under stress open doors to it, and experience it, in a very violent, unpleasant, or dangerous and possibly permanently damaging way. Briefing for a Descent into Hell was an attempt to suggest what in fact this experience could be.

Hendin: Going back to Martha’s experience in the novel, I always wondered – this experience she has occurs right after she has seen her mother after so many years – since in describing it you mention the reproving voice of the mother of childhood as being bound up with it, do you think in some way the connection between …

Lessing: No, not necessarily. This figure, this reproving “do this, don’t do that figure” is internalized, and I don’t think it’s got anything to do with what time an actual mother turns up.

Hendin: I think that’s quite true. But I wonder, in some ways, if to Martha the visit of the mother seems to ruin the time that she’s been having in London, and precipitates a kind of break in her conception of things. Interesting that she sends her mother to her analyst. I thought that was a wonderful scene.

Lessing: I must say, Martha’s not the only person to have done that. I’ve heard about it quite often. It’s using your support figure to say to your parent: “She says so and so.” It helps one out, I suppose.

Hendin: To move away a little bit from the novel, do you see something in the way mothers and daughters get on together, and the way women of one generation create or help create women of the next, as somehow maintaining some particularly painful bond? In other words, are they selfhaters, who feel they must marry, but in some way don’t want to, but that it’s inevitable? Is this something mothers contribute to their daughters?

Lessing: Well, every one of us has to live through our parents, and ourselves, and come out the other side. I don’t know if that makes sense. There’s no good sidestepping one’s parents.

Hendin: I think that’s true. But you’ve written so marvelously of the friendships between women, and yet mothers and daughters in your books don’t seem to get on very well, do they? I suppose that’s true in my case as well.

Lessing: Bernard Shaw once said that mothers should bring up sons, and daughters should be brought up by their fathers, because this was the natural bond and the other was unnatural. I’m not saying I agree with that, but it certainly does seem to be quite hard for parents and children of the same sex to get on together. Not always, of course. But it’s a problem.

Hendin: Why, would you say?

Lessing: Well, it’s biological, again. There’s nothing mystical about it.

Hendin: What’s biological, the attitude?

Lessing: The daughter threatens the mother and the son the father, in the most primitive and backward and animal-like way. You can observe it in any herd of animals, let alone human beings. Most of our behavior is not very advanced, is it? We like to fancy that it is. You can see the sort of competition going on between fathers and sons and mothers and daughters in any family. It’s quite a primitive sort of thing.

Hendin: I think so. I always thought that Martha’s mother was one of the most particularly envious and resentful mothers one could have.

Lessing: I think perhaps it was that generation. I don’t think that women of this generation are so bad because most of them have work. They enjoy their work much more, whereas it was much rarer for women of that generation to have work. And that’s terribly important, not to be out on a limb when you’re fifty, without anything to do. It seems to me that every woman should be very careful that that shouldn’t happen, and nowadays women are indeed very careful that that shouldn’t happen, and that’s why things are better.

Hendin: In the beginning of The Golden Notebook, Anna says: “The point is that as far as I can see everything is cracking up.” Did you have anything particular in mind, or did she, at the time?

Lessing: Yes, it’s no more than what we’ve already talked about. It seems to me that her and our civilization is falling apart. I think that this is what is happening around us, as we sit here. We’re on the top of a slippery slide, and what’s going to be at the bottom I don’t know. Why am I talking of it as if it’s in the future? It’s not in the future; it’s happening now. We’re always talking about physical catastrophes. Just before I left England I was listening to the radio, and there was the President of the World Bank, or some such institution, calmly quoting figures of people who are going to die this year, of hunger. I mean there are millions of people, two-thirds of the people in the world, who don’t get enough to eat, and will be stunted permanently by this, because as you probably know, if a child doesn’t get the right protein at the right time, his brain will be permanently stunted by it. Now this is a quite formidable fact, but they’re always talking about catastrophes as if they are going to happen in the future. Perhaps we should ask how bad does a catastrophe have to be before it becomes a catastrophe.

Hendin: In the title story to your new book, The Temptation of Jack Orkney, Jack Orkney, the main character, how would you describe him? Well, you do describe him.

Lessing: I use fifty thousand words describing him, don’t I?

Hendin: I know. An old guard hero of the left wing, I suppose? No, that’s too pejorative. But, at any rate, a dedicated socialist? When his father dies he begins to dream of his own death in a way, and with a peculiar horror and sweetness at the same time bound up with it. But his personal tragedy is played off against the tragedy in Bangladesh, and the protest that he’s been having to organize against it. Do you see a relation between the personal loss and the public tragedy?

Lessing: Well, it is in the story, isn’t it? Not more than that, no.

Hendin: Well, again, I was wondering. There are two things really. First, the relation between the public and the private, and the way these events shape our dreams, our lives.

Lessing: I don’t know that this story is about the relationship between the public and the private, you see. What I’m describing there is the person who has been like a revolutionary or a left-winger all his life, and then finds himself to be a member of the establishment. This happens to every generation, of course. But what has happened, we see it very sharply in England and Europe; I don’t know about here. It would be different here because the era of McCarthy made a fairly thorough weed-out of your left wing, but in England and in Europe, you would see in all countries, a group of men and women, middle-aged men and women, who in their prime were revolutionaries of one kind or another. I don’t mean to say necessarily Communists. On the contrary. They could have been all kinds. Or not even political. They could have been “world changers,” to use a silly phrase. What has happened to them is what happens to everybody – they’ve become institutions. Now, a set of mental attitudes shared in common by this generation is fairly easy to describe. They’re all believers that society can be endlessly manipulated to achieve good ends. I’m not saying “socialists,” because they include people who aren’t socialists. They were all rationalists and atheists of one kind or another, or most of them were. They tended to have liberal ideas about sex, and so on. Very often their private lives were quite different from their liberal theories. There is a whole series of limited liberal attitudes, shared by all of them. Well, in any place, take one of these men and confront him with the death of his father – because such people tend to be petrified by the idea of death – it’s not a fact that can be assimilated easily into their way of thinking. At his father’s death he starts to dream, which he’s never done before in his life. At the end of the story, this man has turned his back on an opportunity that was offered to him of opening doors on himself, to explore different ways of thinking. In the story he has a door opened for him, even though he doesn’t want it; in fact he’s going to go on dreaming. It is a pretty important door to have opened, because it’s a way of learning a very great deal about oneself, and about this other dimension.

Hendin: Dreams do seem to find more and more of a part in your work.

Lessing: I don’t think they play any more of a part than they have always done. In The Grass Is Singing, for example, the first novel I ever wrote, they play quite an important part. They’ve always played an important part in my life, you see. I’ve found them very useful in my work. In The Summer Before the Dark, I built dreams right into the story, so that the way out for this woman was in fact through her dreams of this magical seal that she found on this hillside. I’m doing a lot of research on dreams at the moment, and I read about it when anything comes my way. It’s possible that we’re not asking the right questions about them, because, after all, dreaming’s not a new phenomenon. It’s a capacity that human beings have always had and in some cultures used quite consciously. Some people in our culture use them quite consciously. There’s a great deal already known about dreams if the scientists would like to look slightly sideways from their straight and narrow path, and read and study what’s already available. But unfortunately they do tend to be somewhat hide-bound, many of them, and they’re not prepared to consider as evidence material that doesn’t fit neatly into their own little boxes. However, I think that even scientists seem to be improving in this direction. So I have hopes. Let’s put it this way. I think a lot of research that is interesting is quite a waste because a lot of it we already know. It’s already around, and has been for thousands of years in fact.

Hendin: At one point, in describing Kate sitting in a restaurant, you say, “She knew now, she had to know at last, that all her life she’d been held upright by an invisible fluid.” Do you think that’s true of women in general?

Lessing: Really it’s true of everyone in general. But it’s certainly true of women because we’ve been taught to attract attention all our lives. You’re taught to be attractive and to dress attractively. For example, I notice that Women’s Lib women tend to be attractive and to dress attractively. They don’t despise the attention-attracting devices that women have always used. I’m not saying that they should. Far from it. I think a good deal of the depression and the mental breakdown of the middle-aged women are due to the fact they suddenly find they’re not able to command attention the way they’ve always been able to command it. Let’s put it like this: an attractive young woman finds it very hard to appreciate what she really is from her appearance, because she has only to walk into a room, or to put herself into an attention-getting situation, to find, in fact, that she can regulate the kind of attention she gets, fairly clearly. You only have to discover the difference between what you really are and your appearance when you get a bit older, which is a most fascinating experience. It really is. It’s one of the most valuable experiences that I personally have ever had. A whole dimension of life suddenly slides away, and you realize that what, in fact, you’ve been using to get attention, or command attention, has been what you look like, sex appeal or something like that. Once again it’s something that belongs to the condition of being a young woman. It’s a biological thing, yet for half your life or more, you’ve been imagining that this attention has been attracted by yourself. It hasn’t. It’s got totally and absolutely and unopposedly nothing to do with you. It really is the most salutary and fascinating experience to go through. It really is most extraordinarily interesting.

Hendin: What do you think of the Women’s Movement?

Lessing: Well, I know very little about it because I’m not involved in it. I’ve met some of the liberation women, and I like them very much personally, but I really do feel that I’ve said all I have to say about this in The Golden Notebook, and some of the things I said about Martha. One can’t go on being preoccupied with the same problem, or the same set of problems. I don’t want to say I’m bored by it, though that’s partly true. It’s just that you work your way out of something, and you go on to something else.

Hendin: Many of the women in the movement would feel that way too. But I think they would see working their way out of it in maybe slightly different terms. I have a feeling that you stress a kind of individualistic approach, more than they would.

Lessing: Well, being a writer is a very individualistic thing, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m not altogether sure that I hold with all this, the dogma that everything has to be done in groups. This is only one of the ways of setting up one’s life or one’s politics. It’s a new dogma, you know, one has to be in groups, but why?

Hendin: I think some of the most important parts of life are lived alone and apart from everyone, men and women alike.

Lessing: That’s right.

Hendin: I once heard you lecture, and you described the situation of a writer having to battle against and confront the world’s indifference. Did you find when you first started writing that there was an audience for your work?

Lessing: You’re putting it very melodramatically. I put it much more clearly than that. I said that when a writer starts, nobody has the slightest interest in reading what he or she has to say, that a writer has to create an audience. I didn’t say anything about battling or anything like that, which I think adds to this somewhat romantic myth about writers being heroic, battling away. I’m always against this romanticizing of situations or people because as soon as you start doing that you lose the capacity to look at a situation coolly, and to see what’s really going on. And there’s far too much of this glamorization of writers and the writing situation.

Hendin: How do you feel about your own career as a writer?

Lessing: Well, I have right here a quotation which I took off the wall from the wall-newspaper downstairs, and it reads: “The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible,” and that was written by Tolstoy. And that is what I feel about writing.

Creating Your Own Demand Minda Bikman (#ulink_4c15d4c1-650f-527d-a30a-79bdd6f1bc8c)

Minda Bikman’s interview originally appeared in The New York Times Book Review March 30, 1980. Copyright © 1980 by Minda Bikman. Reprinted with permission.

Bikman: I found The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five to be a very different kind of novel from its predecessor, Shikasta.

Lessing: I can’t think of another novel like that one. It’s more a sort of legend than anything. It’s in that kind of territory, a legend or myth. There’s never been a book that I enjoyed writing as much as that one. It was a piece of cake, very unlike most of my books, which are agony. I really loved it. When I finished, I was sad that it was ended. But the relationships between these sorts of stylized men and women – that doesn’t strike you as even somewhat comic? Which was my intention, slightly.

Bikman: No, I found the relationships all too real. You described so well the problems men and women seem to encounter, the way people are locked into their perceptions of how things should be. But I found it rather sad that the Queen of Zone Three, the heroine of the novel, had to endure such suffering because her way of living no longer worked for her kingdom. I liked her way of life before it changed; I liked its lightness, its sense of ease.

Lessing: You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, also easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant. I’m not saying good or bad anything. I’m just saying that this is so, whereas the natural male way of going about things is this pompous discipline and lack of subtlety in relations. I’ve recently acquired a thought – but not too seriously, of course – which is: is it possible that women arrived on this planet from a different planet from men at some point? We have such difficulty in relating, in understanding each other. It’s just possible we’re different species altogether. Anyway, that was the idea when I wrote the archetypes of male and female.

Bikman: It has been reported that when you started writing Shikasta you thought it would be one book but that it expanded into five books. Is it definitely five books? Do you have the next three planned?

Lessing: There’s no specific number at all. People have announced that I’m doing three or five. I never had any such thought. What I think is that with this kind of structure, there is nothing to stop me from going on quite a bit until I get bored with it. Because there are all kinds of possibilities. I finished the third one just the other day. It is about a Sirian female offical who’s been one for many thousands of years, and the plot, if you can use that word, is that she slowly discovers through those long ages that, in fact, Canopus is a very much more highly developed empire than Sirius [both Sirius and Canopus developed life on Shikasta] because of course Sirius regards itself in many ways equally good. But this is how she learns how much she might still learn. She is very much an official. She is a bureaucrat, and she thinks like one. I made her a female because, after all, female bureaucrats are innumerable now and I haven’t noticed that they’re all that different from men in operation. Somewhere along the line, female good qualities get lost very often when women are put into positions of certain kinds of power.

I’ve noticed over and over again in these dominantly male structures that there are usually females tucked away, generally in subordinate positions. In fact, they play an extremely important part which no one recognizes – possibly not even they themselves. And I will quote an example that demonstrates it. A friend of mine got ill in Russia and was in hospital. It was a European hospital, with doctors on top, male and female, and wards and the whole lot, just as we’re familiar with. But she was struck more and more by the role played by the ward women, which we do not have in this country. They weren’t nurses so much. They were cleaners, and floated around – they brought meals and all that kind of thing. They had an enormous influence, and everybody relied upon them. Yet they were paid nothing at all, and nobody gave them much respect. In fact, it became evident to her that these females were a kind of bastion. Everything depended on these women for a sort of humanity and decency. Whenever I went into a big organization, I would look for these women. They can be anywhere, they can be at the top or the bottom, but they provide a quality without which the whole thing wouldn’t exist. That is in fact what I think women do generally.